Solved: Updating dereferences - Page 2

sorin_mihai · 09-02-2019 04:35 AM

Hello,

I’m seeing some problems when updating some columns to which there are dereferences …
I hope I’m gonna explain this right:

So there is a table called - Types of Projects,
a table called - Projects
Types of Projects have many Projects.

Then there is a table called Tasks and it’s rows are Tasks, each belonging to a Project

In the Tasks table there is a column - Projects - that is a reference column to the Table Projects. And there is a column called Types of Projects, that is a dereference to the Type of Project that Project is.

In a deck view of Tasks, I have a show if condition, to show only the Tasks belonging to a certain Type of Project. So the point is when I edit the Project to a different Type of Project, all of its Tasks will not show up in this view anymore.

But the problem is that when I edit a Project and change it’s Type of Project, in the Tasks Table I can see that there is no change on the Type of Projects column, so they still show up.
Shouldn’t they update automatically through the dereference?

What I notice is that, if I do the change, and then open the edit form for the Task and just close it again, without changing anything but hitting the Save button, the Type of Project updates … but that would be really … annoying to have to do. There must be a better way or something I’m missing.

Any ideas what I forgot to click?

Thank you,
Sorin

MultiTech

I don’t know how many times I’ve heard from clients, “Shouldn’t it just automagically do…”

Then I have to gently remind them: computers and software are stupid, you have to tell them to do things (and how), they don’t just do things on their own; if we didn’t create a way of updating records based on the edit of another record… why should it automagically work???

AppSheet is amazing and has seriously removed barriers for everyday people to build software specific to their needs; I freakin love it!

Many years ago when references were first introduced, there was discussion about this very topic: updating child records automatically.

The official statement, if I remember it correctly, was something along the lines of,
“We [AppSheet] don’t want to make something that will start affecting or changing an app’s data automatically without the app user or developer knowing about it.”

Something like that; they didn’t want to make something hard-coded that would always do that because there are times when you DON’T want that.

There are methods you can do to accomplish what you’re wanting; I recently made a sample app showing how you can take a signature, timestamp, and user email from the parent and copy it into all the related child records - using automatic background actions so no one knows what’s going on and it just happens.

Hope it helps!

https://www.appsheet.com/samples/How-to-use-Actions-to-copy-a-signature?appGuidString=ce60ae1e-0154-...

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